PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB Video Card Review

Crysis 3

Like the others, it is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek, using their CryEngine 3. Released in February 2013, it is well known to make even powerful system choke. It has probably the highest graphics requirements of any game available today. Unfortunately, Crytek didn’t include a standardized benchmark with Crysis 3. While the enemies will move about on their own, we will attempt to keep the same testing process for each test.

Crysis 3 has a reputation for being highly resource intensive. Most graphics cards will have problems running Crysis 3 at maximum settings, so we settled on no AA with the graphics quality mostly set to Very High with 16x AF. We disabled v-sync and left the motion blur amount on medium.

Crysis 3 appeared to run for the most part on just 3 CPU threads and used up about 15-18% of our Intel Core i7-4960X processor with these settings. Notice that the processor speed was at 3.53GHz and we very seldom, if ever, saw the processor go into turbo mode on Crysis 3.

Benchmark Results: The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290X averaged 20.12 FPS on Cysis 3 with these aggressive settings on the 4K display. Not bad and it was just slightly slower than some of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards!

Benchmark Results: It is extremely hard to replicate the same run over and over manually with FRAPs, but you can see the similarities and none of the cards experienced any stutters or drops during testing on Crysis 3.